May, 19, 2006 archives

lax-c is one of those gems of downtown that doesn’t get enough credit. it is basically an asian costco (without the memberships), but it also has a crazy back room with giant thai elephants and buddhas and a totally insane dragon bench.

for our engagement party, we picked up a couple of five pound containers of coconut in coconut cream — it’s basically little chunks of coconut inside ice cream made from coconut milk instead of cow juice. it’s now easily one of my favorite foods on the planet. we had one container left after the party, and it did not last for very long after that.

we also picked up some jars of kaong (sugar palm fruit), macapuno (coconut sport), ube (purple yam) jam, and enough chopsticks to build a small house.

and on top of all the cool food and other stuff, the building is wrapped in a mural about the history of california.

way back in the summer of 1990, i participated in the people to people student ambassador program, and spent a month traveling through parts of western and eastern europe. i recently had the negatives from the ten rolls of film i shot on the trip digitized, and i’m going to start putting the highlights online.

the first two days were spent in washington, d.c., where we toured the capitol building and some of the other usual tourist stops. we also met up with some of the other student groups getting ready to head overseas.

as you can see, standing in a rotunda and shooting up isn’t just a new habit of mine.

as a preview to come, here’s the itinerary from the trip:

• june 24-25: washington, d.c.
• june 26-28: munich, west germany
• june 29: nuremberg, west germany
• june 30-july 1: dresden, east germany
• july 2-4: prague, czechoslovakia
• july 5-7: krakow, poland
• july 8-9: lvov, u.s.s.r.
• july 10: debrecen, hungary
• july 11-13: budapest, hungary (homestay)
• july 14-15: budapest, hungary (hotel)
• july 16-17: balaton, hungary
• july 18-21: vienna, austria (homestay)
• july 22-23: vienna, austria (hotel)
• july 24: return home

of the seven countries (besides the united states), four of them no longer exist as they did back then — east and west germany have unified, czechoslovakia split up into the czech republic and slovakia, and the u.s.s.r. broke up.

a few months ago, they shot some scenes for house at my fiancée celia’s penthouse at the alexandria hotel. this is a screen grab from the episode (actually from the beginning of the second part of the two-episode story). part of the penthouse was made up to be a cop’s apartment. so for that setting, they shot basically everything at the penthouse except for the rooftop enclosed greenhouse where he was growing weed.

this is how it looked on television — celia has shots she took of the penthouse with all the stuff they used to make it look like a ratty cop’s apartment, and i’m sure she’ll post them once she digs out from under the project she’s currently buried underneath.

there were a couple of scenes where characters climbed out of a window to get on to the roof outside. there is a door about five feet to the left of that window.